Nicholas Shakespeare is one of the few contemporary British novelists who successfully integrate the political with the personal in the lives of his characters. Like Graham Greene, he has an eye for a dramatic historical backdrop: in The Dancer Upstairs, it was the Shining Path insurgency in Peru; in his new novel, Snowleg, it is the communist regime in East Germany.
The story opens when Peter Hithersay, a pupil at an English public school, is summoned home to celebrate his 16th birthday. There his mother tells him that his real father is not her husband, Rodney — an ‘affable and diffident’ commercial artist — but a fugitive East German political prisoner whom she had harboured for one night while competing in a choral competition in Leipzig. The revelation has a seismic effect on the teenage Peter: ‘all his solidity gone’, he leaves school in England to study medicine in Hamburg.
During his third year of studies, Peter is persuaded to join a theatrical troupe on a trip behind the Iron Curtain to Leipzig, the city of his conception. There Peter meets a girl — ‘long and thin with watery eyes and cheeks like old sails tight-stretched on either side of a straight nose’. ‘My grandmother calls me Snj